hundreds of people fail to appear for work, and nobody pays any attention. Every day the number absent without leave rises. . After the district Party Committee told the management that their behaviour sheltered truants, in the course of two days they brought proceedings against seventy-two absentees. But this was not the end of [the management’s] mistakes. Of the 72 cases half had to be sent back again, for lack of evidence.22
Academic life kept going for a remarkably long time. The Persianist Aleksandr Boldyrev was still taking tutorials in the Hermitage in late December (and scolding his students for turning in poor work). Nikolai Punin was doing the same until late November. At the Erisman Hospital the pathologist Vladimir Garshin lectured through the air raids, and held exams as usual at the end of the winter term, even as his students died in their hostels. (The single men, he noticed, collapsed first; girls and married couples lasted longer.) The only way to keep going, he thought, was to keep working:
So we invent things for the laboratory assistants to do, just to keep them occupied. If you stop working, lie down, it’s bad — there’s no guarantee you’ll get up again. One of the assistants died in the lab itself. She was found in the morning curled up in a ball underneath a warm shawl, wearing new brown felt boots. She hadn’t gone home, it was too far. Another assistant’s husband was killed in the street during an artillery barrage. She took two days’ absence and then returned to work, her dropsy-swollen face even puffier from tears. She is silent. Does work go on? Yes it does, somehow. The important thing is not to give up. The examinations are happening, and I’m taking the orals — their presentations aren’t bad! The lectures sank in after all! And the examiner, my assistant, grills them thoroughly but gently. Where do they get their strength from?23
Inber watched another Erisman doctor defend his thesis in the hospital’s air-raid shelter; the toasts afterwards were drunk in diluted spirits.24
The higher-profile institutions especially persisted in a defiant, almost surreal facsimile of normal life right through the winter’s worst days. On 9 February Inber attended a two-day Conference of Baltic Writers, organised by the Writers’ Union. To prepare she darned extra gloves and stockings, swapped four canteen meals for two eggs and a small piece of dried-up cheese, and dipped into her private food stock for a bar of chocolate. The walk from the Erisman to the conference venue, in normal times a pleasant stroll from the Petrograd Side to Vasilyevsky Island, took two hours, during which she passed snowed-in trams, a building that had been burning, unattended, all night, and a street flooded by a broken fire hydrant, the unexpected water giving off twists of vapour that caught the pink dawn light. At the end of a day of readings, reports and speeches she retired to a bunk set up behind a curtain in the tobacco-fugged conference hall. In the early hours she was woken by the sound of smashing wood. ‘It was Z, who was using an axe to demolish the chair on which he had been sitting during the presentations. I watched him throw the pieces into the stove — helpless Leningrad chairs! I grew warm again and went back to sleep.’
At the Academy of Sciences Georgi Knyazev, confined more than ever to his ‘small radius’ because the cold had seized up his wheelchair, watched helplessly as his subordinates — to whom he had so recently given pep talks — died around him. ‘Shakhmatova Kaplan and her sixteen-year-old son Alyosha’, he wrote on 5 January, ‘have died of dystrophy. The boy was extremely gifted and loved astronomy. He would undoubtedly have made a name for himself, perhaps even have become an Academician. The news greatly affected me and all our staff.’ The following day a Commission on the History of the Academy of Sciences went ahead with a scheduled meeting, at which Knyazev presented a report (‘perhaps my last’) titled ‘The History of the Heads of the Academy’s Departments Throughout its Existence (1925–1941)’. As he read a ‘poor wretch’ lay outside in the courtyard, already stripped of his boots. Keeping up a confident façade, Knyazev admitted to his diary, was now almost impossible:
I try to smile when I’m with other people, to sound cheerful and optimistic, to raise their spirits. . Only here, on these pages, do I permit myself to relax my self-restraint. Here I am as I really am. I saw Svikul, who has just lost her fifteen-year-old son Volodya, a modest youngster. Inconsolable grief, despair — these are pitiful words in comparison with what is expressed in her eyes, her sunken cheeks and quivering chin. I put my arms around her, hugged her, and that was all I could do.25
